Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A funny thing happened on the way to this column. Right when I was ready to accuse Washington Post columnist George Will of building another straw man to tear apart, one of Will’s straw men appeared! It’s as if Will himself cued it up, as I’ll describe in a bit.
The evidence has become quite persuasive that humans are bumping into interrelated natural limits to growth that spell big trouble no matter what we do. We appear to be in the grip of multiple interrelated crises that are converging into an overall crisis.
Following last year’s ASPO conference, I was interviewed by Aaron Wissner of Local Future, which is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to issues of energy, the environment, and sustainability. Aaron just made that interview available, and instead of an R-Squared Energy TV episode this week, I thought I would share this interview with readers.
Strange as it may seem, humans seem to have evolved in a way that we have a need for external energy, such as energy from burning wood or fossil fuels. While the evidence is not 100% certain, it appears that we learned to use fire long enough ago that it is now necessary for our food to be cooked…There are other evolutionary deficiencies as well: How do we deal with our lack of fur? How do we deal with our evolutionary dental problems? How do we deal with “survival of the fittest”?…In this post, I will explain how these and other evolutionary issues relate to mankind’s need for external energy, such as wood, or gasoline, or electricity.
Yes, there’s still oil in the ground. We just can’t afford it. In broad terms, the peak oil analysts were right. But the fossil fuel industry is winning the PR battle.
-China to spend $372 billion on cutting energy use, pollution
-China’s mega coal power bases exacerbate water crisis – in pictures
-Thousands being moved from China’s Three Gorges – again
-China and its controversial carbon appetite [Book review]
-Arctic sea ice reaches record low, Nasa says
-Arctic sea-ice melt record more than broken, it’s being smashed
-This isn’t just natural variation – it’s caused by global warming
-Along with the Arctic ice, the rich world’s smugness will melt
-As Arctic Ice Reaches Record Low, Meteorologists Name Humans ‘Dominant’ Cause Of Climate Change
It started with a conversation that became a manifesto that became a book that became a festival that became a movement. Three years on the Dark Mountain Project is still hard to define. It is both a cultural response to a collapsing world, and a network of people who gather to makes sense of that collapse. At its core is a shared recognition that the stories we have inherited are are no longer making sense of our lives, and a new narrative for the times we are living in needs to be forged.
When modern people try to gauge whether climate change is real, they run into several problems. We no longer live with a sense of our surroundings as our ancestors did, but spend much of our time in a bubble of regulated temperature and lighting. Even when we allow ourselves to feel the elements, we do so for a narrow sliver of time; until recently most people only lived to forty years or so, and while we have almost doubled that figure lately, our lives still flicker on and off quickly compared to those trees or turtles.
I can’t figure out why Mark Twain is considered such a smarty pants for noticing that people always talk about the weather but never do anything about it. If people talk about the weather – this summer’s drought, and its likely impact on runaway food prices and forest fires – that’s deep folk wisdom recognizing how completely Nature determines our life prospects, not matter what level of air conditioning is available.
Earlier this month (via an article in the Financial Times) I picked up on the latest annual State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report, published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. The argument is summarised by the FT in one line: “too many countries have too many boats doing too good a job”. And while this is pretty much what it has said each year since 1994, this year the tone has changed. They’ve moved from palliative concern to something a little more strident, at least by the standards of international organisations.
It’s the first season for our Transition group’s community garden, but already we’ve taken to calling it the Fossil Fuel Free Garden. The tagline is an easy way for us to make the point that not only do we expect our fellow gardeners to stay organic (no chemicals, please) but that we have the additional requirement that no power tools be used at the garden.
